ABSTRACT
In this chapter, the author focuses on key analyses, including the radical conceptualizations of the myth of protection put forward in the 1970s and the feminist postcolonial dialogues on the role of international norms of protection in global politics. She argues that the protection myth uses gender to naturalize power relations and that unequal gender norms consequently define conceptualizations of agency, citizenship, and security. The author focuses on the ideas and identities that the gendered myth of protection actualizes, as well as on its concrete politics and implications, and its effects for understandings of citizenship and agency. She examines the construction of protector/protected identities and how the gendered myth of protection has brought these identities into national security discourse and war-making. The author discusses the protection myth's significance for women's citizenship and political agency. She concludes with the obstacles to challenging the gendered myth of protection and highlights the pressing need for feminist interventions.
